Monday, January 29, 2018

CCDD 012918—Fatetouch

Cool Card Design of the Day1/29/2018 - It's been almost two months since I've shared a card design with you as we've been prepping for the initial trials of GDS3. Today I want to share with you a mechanic that I had been really excited about until I realized a killer problem with it. Let me build it up before I tear it down.

Lifelink and infect are great mechanics mainly because they interact so tightly with one of Magic's pillar mechanics, damage, but also because they do so automatically. I went looking for other effects some time ago that could link up with damage creatures deal and came up with scry.

What's particularly cool about marrying combat damage with scry is that it gives the player access to smoothing and in a way that feels very blue-black—a color combination in need of a combat mechanic.

Opal Gang Thug has the potential to smoothe your draws a ton, but will often only get one hit in and one instance of scry 2. Masked Seer only gets to scry 1, but will likely get in several times, or hold off some attacks. Frost Harbinger will probably scry 1 as it pings your opponent for a long time.

First, let me clarify in case this ability looks inappropriate: It's getting +1/+1 from the {B} and +1/-1 or -1/+1 from the {U}. Too clever?

In this case, it doesn't matter, because we begin to see the problem with fatetouch. In practice, this card would need to be rare.

Just adding +0/+2 to Opal Gang Thug—increasing the chance it gets to deal damage more than once—increases its rarity.

Troubled Djinn is ridiculous. You get to scry 1 when it dings you, like that's some kind of drawback, and then scry 2 when it hits your opponent. This would still be amazing at {B}{B}, even if it caused you to lose 1 life instead of dealing 1 damage to you.

Prowess + fatetouch is actually pretty cool.

Notice how hard it is to justify equipping a creature of any power for the same low price?

Here it is. If you weren't sure what I was talking about before, or perhaps were unconvinced, check out this six-mana-for-merely-4-power rare sphinx. Every time it hits (or blocks), you get to look at the top four cards of your deck, and put them back in any order, as well as ditching the ones you don't want. Not only is that disgustingly strong card selection, it's going to slow the game down a lot.

The problem with fatetouch is that scry 2 is a strong ability; Scry 3 is almost Ideas Unbound; There's only a single instance of scry 4 in all of Magic, on Foresee, and that only fires once. If you were to increase the power of any of these creatures, it would be disgusting. (And by 'disgusting' I mean both too strong and hurting the flow of the game.)

At first blush, it looks like we can just tone the ability down by decoupling it from damage dealt and restricting it to only ever scry 1. And that certainly does mitigate the problem. But scrying 1 every turn via Frost Harbinger is still a huge amount of card selection. And if I ever have two or three fatetouch creatures out at the same time, not only am I getting too much scry, but I'm doing it in the most awkward way possible (one at a time, multiple times per round). Ugh.

Unfortunately, I'm forced to conclude that this mechanic can't be keyworded and belongs on a three-card vertical cycle at most. Probably spread across three sets.

I could stand to see more blue/black creatures that scry 1 or 2 when they ETB or die, though.

28 comments:

Yeah, and then there's the issue that that amount of repeatable scry will also lead to repetitive play patterns where you just dig for your removal and bombs and get to see them every game.

Cool feature, though. I know we don't know who's making Trial 3 and who isn't, and people want to keep pet designs under wraps for now, but more features like this (where you talk up a promising mechanic and then explain the problems and why it ultimately doesn't work) would be totally cool.

Fatetouch (If one or more creatures you control with Fatetouch attack or block, scry that many cards.)

This prevents multiple Scry triggers, which is awkward, and caps the ability at one scry per creature. Scry 4 or 5 is still possible, but it takes investment. It's also parasidic, but not so badly that I don't want to play other creatures or that the lack of a critical number makes them unplayable.

This is one of the problems with the way Magic handles triggers: This ability would scry X where X is the number of fatetouch creatures that did you had do combat, but each of them would scry X because all those triggers are independent.

Jay, this isn't necessarily true. You'd want this to work more like Ascend where multiple creatures having the ability doesn't result in multiple triggers because it's not a triggered ability. Instead it's an conditional event that happens as happens if Fatetouch attackers or blockers are declared.

There are definitely problems making that ability work, but I think Wobbles' wording *may* work: the comprehensive rules specifies that you scry X for the number of creatures, but it doesn't trigger multiple times; and the reminder text makes it clear by implication that it doesn't stack.

Oh. I often forget that reminder text is just that. Yes, we could have an ability like Wobbles' describes that handles all the weirdness in the rules and just has to get enough of the idea across to players to get them on the right track. Man, I can get so caught up on finding independently-functional text for the keyword.

I will say that this reminder text looks too much like something that makes sense on its own and will be interpreted as I did without further thought (by some players). We'd need something that makes it clearer there's something larger/different going on.

Yeah. I guess part of it is that you can imagine that wording being costed more expensively, but being worth it, whereas the original scry wording has the problem that even for scry 1, the creature needs to be quite expensive, but it needs to be very expensive if it may occasionally get enchanted and start repeatedly scrying for 4.

Also, this version should probably be combat damage to players only as well, even if that's less lifelink-like.

And I guess this is often scry 1, it's only better when it's a card you want that's less than the cut-off. I almost wonder if it should *not* be scry, as in, if it doesn't fit the requirement, you don't get a choice about it -- but you'd need a way for people to not feel cheated in that case.

It was very relevant. Magic needs a lot of smoothing to consistently be a game, and all the scry in Theros is about as close as we've gotten (alongside the explore in Ixalan, the cycling in Amonkhet, and investigate in Shadows.) It was slightly more important in Theros because of the A-B mechanics of heroic and bestow.

That's tempting. If they block, they're likely trading, and ending your reign of scry (which is good, especially since you can work to prevent that). It then makes the opponent decide whether they'd rather take the damage or let you scry, which is cool. That ends up being pretty evasion-y, though, which isn't what blue-black needs most. But working on defense might be enough to justify that.

I don't think the strength of the effect is the problem. Creatures with lifelink rarely show up at larger sizes, and making someone work for it is kind of fun. The main problem looks like the time component. lifelink, wither, and infect all just involve a notation change. Scrying takes time, and the bigger the number, the longer it takes (I think it's O(2N!) but I could be wrong).

If you can lock the size of the scry, and preferably also the number of scries, you have a better handle on the parameters, and can cost things more confidently.

Fatetouch (Whenever one or more creatures you control with fatetouch deal combat damage to a player, scry 2.)

Hopefully that reminder text spells out what I mean. You get one "scry 2" whenever at least one of your scrytouchers deals damage. If one of them deals regular combat damage to players, scry 2. If five of them deal regular combat damage to players, scry 2. If one deals first strike and one deals regular, scry 2 for each.

Even 'just' scrying 2 a turn is powerful. Powerful enough that you want to take steps to keep the game moving - linking it to any damage doesn't do that as effectively as combat damage, or combat damage to players. By having it trigger on one or more, you reduce parasitism, since it's now a threshold 1 mechanic, and each card that cares also can bring the trigger. More is still good, since it increases the likelihood of you getting through (since we tie it to combat damage to players), but it's not exponential like a lot of parasitic mechanics. By locking the number you prevent time sinks and power concerns. But we still have first strike and regular damage, which is cool.

Anywho, that's my take on the ability. It has promise, don't give up on it.

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We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.